Obamacare's Onerous Rules Include A Blacklist Of America's Doctors

While you may find looking at pictures of festering wounds during dinner renders your food unpalatable, for physicians it is a daily occurrence. Chances are, especially for those who frequent local steakhouses, many people have witnessed physicians being presented with data pertaining to the newest drug on the market. However, in the name of “transparency” these industry-sponsored events, in which busy physicians are detailed on new products, devices, and services over dinner, are now being targeted under a provision of Obamacare.

As if the onerous requirements government subjects physicians to were not enough, Obamacare mandates the creation and maintenance of a list of physicians who have been the recipient of a meal paid for by industry. Such a blacklist is an explicit attack on our professional integrity as we are now relegated to the status of government bureaucrats (the eventual result of government-controlled healthcare) whose arbitrary decisions can be swayed with superficial gifts and who, therefore, require policing. Such a rationale evades the fact that Medicine is an evidence-based discipline welded to the principles of science and not a capricious endeavor.

While films such as The Fugitive and The Constant Gardenermay be gripping and suspenseful, their portrayals of maniacal physicians and their nefarious industry counterparts are pure fiction. Americans are not going to find their physicians prescribing incorrect treatments in ord

er to reciprocate for a steak dinner. Additionally, because of healthcare quality initiatives pursued by hospitals and insurance companies, physicians must answer to peers, insurers, hospital administration, and–most importantly–the patient left with lingering symptoms for inefficacious treatment regimens. Indeed, such a system has uncovered physicians performing unnecessary cardiac procedures several times. In these cases no forensic analysis of dinner lists hunting for “blemished” physicians was needed.

It is perfectly legitimate if an individual hospital, professional society, or insurance company requires its affiliated physicians to disclose their relationships with industry as a condition of employment or association. In such a case a physician is free to refrain from such an arrangement if he deems it unsuitable. A physician is also free to relay his dealings with industry to his patients individually or on a website if he so chooses. Under Obamacare, mandates backed by fines for non-compliance replace such judgements.

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, as this part of Obamacare is known, even stipulates reporting physician names regardless of whether the product being marketed is (or was) FDA approved for use. Such a proviso clearly identifies that the true purpose of this regulation, hiding behind the veil of transparency, is to reinforce the reality to physicians that no longer are they the masters of their own livelihoods or autonomous; they are now mere cogs in what has become almost a total state enterprise in which compliance with any order is the currency. A better recipe for cognitive stultification, which will ultimately impact patient care, could not be devised.

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